My plan, if you remember, was to write a series of blogs following the development of the World’s Collider anthology, inviting you behind the scenes to see how it all came together. No holds barred, and all that.

With the release of the book due in just a day or two, you’ll note that this didn’t quite happen. The book was largely put together via a private Facebook group, where developments could be tracked, commented on, and evolved. A great deal of chatter happened, alongside significant amounts of tomfoolery. Elise flaunted an obsession with mustard that may need to be recategorised as a fetish. Much thought was given to whether the book should be retitled Severance, in order to best capitalise on James‘s presence. Steve got knocked off his bike at a critical moment, and had to be bonded to Steve in order to wrap up the book. All good stuff, and a very entertaining way to put a book together.

However, there were other things that in the end don’t belong on an open blog. Luckily, none of these involved people falling out, but at the same time they’re perhaps better kept in-house. When you’re working in a closed group, there’s a freedom to chat about all manner of things, and once you’ve got to know everybody it’s easy to be less circumspect than you might be elsewhere. Our line-up changed slightly, our cover art has evolved, we’re no longer with the same publisher – on the face of it, not that dramatic, but it’s not really for me to publish a behind the scenes account of any of that.

So, mustard and Severance aside, what I can natter about is my own story, and how the group affected it. As I’ve mentioned, my story ‘Twitchers’ is placed towards the end of the sequence, leading into the climax and conclusion. I had a couple of things to carry forward from other stories – a train, a character, a few mentions of gasbags and the like – but nothing that didn’t fit well around the pitch I made to get into the book.

I wrote, wrote again, and submitted. I liked the story, which stayed true to what I said I was going to contribute. I particularly liked my primary character Findo Gask, a hard, cold man capable of surprising moments of valour. Our editor Richard Salter liked him too, and passed him around the group to see if he could be seeded into earlier tales. I patted myself on the back. Hooray for me! Hooray for Findo!

Then they made me kill him.

Actually, that’s overstating the case.

They made me cut his bollocks off.

Towards the end of the process, Richard began looking through the finished stories, looking for new ways to bind them together. As you may remember, World’s Collider isn’t your usual anthology, but rather a mosaic novel – a single novel told through many authors. Richard’s final task was to make sure it worked at that level, as more than the sum of its parts. One of the things he noticed was the gender imbalance.

All of the primary characters, the ones who recur throughout the book, were men.

There was some umming and ahhing. Nobody was comfortable with having collectively failed to put a single major female character into the book. Stories featured a natural enough gender mix, no problem there, but this is a novel, and the novel characters were all blokes.

Somebody had to change sex. This is a big ask, for anyone.

I offered Findo up for the chop, sent him kicking and screaming to the big shears. He was a good choice – in some ways one of the least feminine characters we could have changed, which avoids gender stereotyping.

Bye bye Findo Gask. Step forward, Natalie Murphy. It’s not a case of just swapping out some genitals. She’s a different character, and one I like a lot. She’s also born entirely of this book, rather than being a character I placed into it. I like that too. Nat Murphy rocks.

Do I miss Findo? Yes I do. By the time the change was made, he was already a developed character, with his own life and problems. He’s not dead though. At the moment, he’s trapped in a sophisticated underwater research station off the coast of Goa, with something enormous and deadly approaching.

That’s a story for another day though.

I hope you’ll grab a copy of World’s Collider when it comes out in a couple of days. You can pre-order the paperback and Kindle version right now, if you like. It’s a melting pot of voices, ideas, and stories, all bound together by Richard Salter into one apocalyptic mosaic novel. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Don’t miss out.

As is the case with many shared world projects, the submission guidelines asked not for a completed story, but instead for a short ‘pitch’ of a couple of hundred words, a thumbnail sketch of the imagined story, showing the beginning, middle, and end. There are lots of reasons to put an anthology together in this way, and one of the biggest is that nobody wants to waste anybody else’s time. The guidelines about the event Mr Salter wants to chronicle were necessarily specific to the book he’s putting together. For an author, this means that any story written is going to be extremely difficult to try to sell elsewhere, if they were to be rejected from this book. By asking for pitches instead, the editor saves us the agony of having to write something that might never be seen anywhere else.

In addition, with the accepted stories not yet written, it affords the greatest opportunity for the writers to cross-pollinate each other’s work with references back and forward, to try to give that sought after ‘one story, lots of writers’ feel. It makes a lot of sense, then, for the stories to be written after everyone has been introduced, and a proper conversation is begun.

Historically, pitching ideas is not my strength. I struggle enormously to compress a 5000 word story into a couple of hundred, and come up with a snappy compressed version that makes editors want to read the whole thing. Richard Salter is one of the first editors to buy a story from me based on a pitch – it was a few years ago, when he was putting together the (now extremely coveted and hard to find – good luck!) Doctor Who anthology Short Trips: Transmissions. Having been invited to pitch, and having had an idea that I thought might be interesting (hey, what if the whole adventure takes place in an Internet chat room?), every attempt I made to render the story as a readable pitch made me want to weep at how bad it sounded.

So I cheated, wrote the whole story, crossed my fingers, and sent it in. A big risk, because nobody else had a licence to publish Doctor Who fiction at the time, and the story wouldn’t work if I took the Doctor out. Could’ve have been time spent writing something I could never show anybody. It’s a good thing Richard liked the story, then.

However, it’s not an approach I’d recommend. At some point, unless writing thousands and thousands of words you can never sell appeals, you need to knuckle down and work pitches out. I’ve had opportunity now to pitch for a few more things, including the Iris Wildthyme books from Obverse and World’s Collider. My success rate is on the up, as my bibliography clearly shows, but I can’t claim to hit the mark every time.

On this occasion, I did. It helps that I know the editor from previous experience (and have also been published alongside him). That doesn’t predispose him to buy my story (he’s a well connected sort, and many of his submissions came from excellent writers that he asked to pitch, and many were rejected), but it gives me a small advantage in interpreting what he was trying to do with the book. I had an idea that the successful tales might be ones that held the most opportunities for being customised to a story arc. Not easy, as I had no idea what the arc might actually be, so I made sure the story was both a self-contained thing, and that it contained some very flexible writing devices that would let me back reference and drop clues when I knew what the other authors were up to.

Tricky balancing act, but on this occasion, I clearly got something right. To be honest, I haven’t asked Richard whether it was the self-contained story, the flexible elements, or a bit of both that got it over the line in the face of stiff competition. I probably don’t want to know, until the story is finished.

With the pitch submitted, it was the usual waiting game, until the announcement on 3rd of October this year. I was in. And boy, was I in good company…

It was at this point that the conversation began. But that’s another blog post. Stick around, and I’ll let you eavesdrop.

And in the meantime, the book has its own Facebook page. You really should go and like it.